Christopher Kostyn Passante: INTERVENTION • Cleaver Magazine

Flash Nonfiction by Christopher Kostyn Passante
INTERVENTION

Let’s begin with your name.

Thomas.
Last name?
Paine.
Interesting.
Why’s that interesting, doc?
That you share a name with a famous revolutionary?
It’s just a name my father gave me.
I see. Did he know?
Did he know what? That he’d named me after a famous revolutionary, or that I would actually grow up to become one?
So, you do know why you’re here?
Here, like existentially, or here, like with a dime-store shrink in a federal sweatbox?
You had mentioned that your father named you. Let’s talk about him.
What about him?
What was your father like?
He died when I was six. Barely knew him.
Any early recollections?
Wasn’t around much. Most of what I know about him comes from my dreams.
Your dreams?
Yeah, he’s what you’d call a recurrence.
Could you give me an example?
Last night, I dreamed I was little, walking the trail behind the house I grew up in, over in Coalville.
That was in Pennsylvania, correct?
Yes, that’s correct.
Go on.
Anyway, I was walking the trail from the pond where I used to play. The scent of the balsam and peat on humid summer days—
This is the pond where you found your father after he hanged himself?
Mmhmm. But in the dream, my father was walking a ways behind—he always made me walk ahead, alone.
I see.
And suddenly there was this lion—you know, with a big mane—on the other side of the creek, way up on the ledge, watching me. I didn’t think he could get down and cross, but then he just started tearing after us.
Then what?
My father screamed at me to run. His voice was high—scared, like I’d never heard him, like a boy—and I knew he was going to let the lion kill him rather than me. So, I wouldn’t look back, but I could hear him yelling for me to run faster, and I ran as fast as my little legs could carry me. I could hear my Wellies flapping against my bony calves. I was so afraid of tripping. I always tripped in those boots.
And then?
The recurring part: I’m running in my six-year-old body one minute, but the next, I’m my age now.
Which is?
Thirty-six.
How could you tell?
I mean, it was me now, like today. In my clothes. Fully grown, but I was still running, and I turned around, expecting to see my father, and—
Go ahead, Thomas.
And the little boy, six-year-old me in duck shorts and Wellies, is running behind me. It’s not my father back there anymore, it’s me. And he is—I am—terrified and crying, and all the while the lion is bearing down.
What did you do?
I stop, and I pick him up, and I throw him in front of me and watch his little legs in those flapping Wellies run down the trail, and I…
And you? Thomas?
And I am my father.

Christopher Kostyn Passante is a former journalist with advanced degrees in creative writing, journalism, and theology. His short stories have appeared in the Bellingham Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, Blood+Honey, and other publications. His debut novel, Earthshine, is set to be published in 2027 by Apprentice House Press. An alumnus of the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop and a finalist for the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, he writes from Pennsylvania’s Allegheny Mountains, where he lives with his family and two wily Australian shepherds.